Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory masthead A-Z Index Berkeley Lab masthead U.S. Department of Energy logo Phone Book Jobs

STRATEGIC DIRECTIONS

Our Mission Our Mission
From the infinite scale of the universe, to the infinitesimal scale of sub-atomic particles, Berkeley Lab researchers are addressing national and global challenges and advancing the scope of human knowledge through an array of scientific programs, partnerships and proposals. Featured are some of the critical efforts already underway or in development.

Photon Science:
X-Rays for Discovery

Scientists in Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, and other divisions are exploring new ways to produce ultrafast, ultrabright beams of x-rays that can catch electrons in the act of reshaping the world around us.

Climate Change and
Environmental Sciences

At Berkeley Lab, climate scientists, geologists, microbiologists, computer scientists, and engineers tackle some of the planet's most pressing issues--from predictive models to study climate and complex global interactions, to carbon storage and environmental remediation.

Energy Efficiency and
Sustainable Energy

There’s enough power in an hour’s worth of global sunlight to supply an entire year’s worth of human energy demands with no carbon emissions to exacerbate global warming. But until we are able to make full and effective use of this bounty, energy efficiency remains the most readily available means of reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

Computational Science
and Networking

Berkeley Lab scientists and computing resources located at Berkeley Lab have helped to pioneer our understanding of climate change, how proteins conduct life’s fundamental work, and how a star explodes — to name just a few advances. Berkeley Lab is at the vanguard of high performance computing and high speed networking, both of which are required by today’s data-intensive, international scientific collaborations.

Matter and Force
in the Universe

Berkeley Lab scientists were pathfinders to the universe as we now know it, and are still in the vanguard of exploration from studying the mystery of dark energy and the elusive neutrino, to investigating the heart of the atomic nucleus and designing apparatus to probe the secrets of high-energy physics.

Biological Sciences for
Energy Research

Extracting and fermenting plant sugars into advanced biofuels that can replace gasoline on a gallon-for-gallon basis has the potential to far exceed today’s entire global production of oil. Berkeley Lab researchers are working towards this goal via three major efforts – the Joint BioEnergy Institute, the Joint Genome Institute, and the Energy Biosciences Institute.